PTSD
by Venti the Vicious
Summary: I wrote this as a final Writing Workshop piece for my 11th grade English class. Dealing with Alex getting shot. AO, Oneshot


He didn't yell fast enough. The gun was being held out of the SUV's window and it was aimed right at her. As a lawyer, she knew to deliberately think about her next move. As a cop, I only knew how to react on instinct. In watching her think about it, I was a second too late. I couldn't pull her down onto the concrete to shield her before she had fallen backwards, a small hole in the front of her blouse oozing crimson. _Stay with me… Stay with me, please… Keep your eyes open, please…_With all of my weight behind me, I pressed my hands into the wound in her chest. I continued to mutter to her, mutter to keep her awake and muttering to keep myself hopeful, but to no avail. Her eyes fluttered shut as the sound of a million sirens approaching flooded my ears. I could feel myself being pulled off of my knees and away from her body.

In less than a second, I was on my feet, my hands soaking in her blood and my face stained with tears. I didn't even know I was crying, but it got worse as she was pulled onto a gurney and then led into the ambulance. The paramedic gave us the name of the hospital, climbed in the back of the ambulance and slammed the door. Eliot delivered the two slaps to the back door and they pulled away, speeding from zero to eighty in what felt like no time at all. Before tonight, I would have ridden in the ambulance. But the paramedics knew who I was, they knew who she was and they knew that she was everything to me. As much as I hated to admit it, it was probably better that I didn't ride along. Loved ones are never any good in the ambulance.

He pulled me down the sidewalk, off the curb and to our unmarked, station-issued car, where the sirens went on and we sped down the streets of New York like our lives depended on it. Ours didn't, hers did. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't keep my mind off the fact that any number of things could happen to her. She could be declared brain dead. She could be wheeled into surgery. Worst of all, they could call her time of death. Until that moment, I had never realized how much we ask of the families of our victims. We tell them to stay positive and hope for the best, but the chances of that aren't high when you know exactly what you're up against.

I felt the car jerk upward and lunge forward just a little bit before the parking brake was put into place and the engine was killed. I would be alarmed if Eliot hadn't been my partner for going on six years, but he had and it was just something I got used to. The door of the car flew open, only to slam shut once my boots hit the sidewalk. Approaching the emergency room, the automatic doors slid open with ease and were half-closed when Eliot approached them. At this hour, the nurse that was working the registration desk knew me by name and called out to me. That didn't matter right now, getting to Alex's side did.

I'd been through this hospital so many times that it took no effort to make my way through an empty triage room, past nurses' station after nurses' station and to the back of the building. She had been rolled through the back doors of the building minutes before and the emergency room doctors were moving with the utmost precision. Despite the fact that I would trust these doctors with my life, I didn't trust them with hers. I stood outside the trauma room, watching them work and praying for color to return to her face. The fact that I was praying caught myself off guard; I'd never been one to pray.

The bullet was too deep, I heard one of the doctors call out. They needed to wheel her to an operating room and they needed to do it quickly, if they were going to save her life. A nurse, one I've never seen before and one who didn't seem to know who I was, came up to me and put a hand on each of my shoulders. I flinched and she stepped back, only to lean her face closer to my ear than she was before. "I'm really sorry, but I need you to go to the waiting room. The officers on the case are looking to talk to you about what happened."

_I _should be the officer on this case. That wasn't her problem and I knew that, so I retreated from the trauma room and made my way back to the waiting room slower than I'd come. As I passed the last nurses' station, Agent Hammond passed me, headed in the direction from which I had just come. I had nothing to say to him and he didn't make eye contact. If I wasn't busy hating him, we would get along really well.

The uniformed officers, though inexperienced, asked me the questions they needed to and took the notes that they were to give to the detective on the case, whoever that should be. Eliot brought coffee, but the aroma made me want to lose what little content my stomach still had, so he drank it himself. He excused himself for a minute to call his wife and inform her that, once again, he would not be home until the following night and that she shouldn't be worried. I felt like I had been in that waiting room for days when the nurses changed shifts. A new girl took her seat at the desk in place of the nurse that I'd known since I was a rookie. It had to be somewhere around midnight, meaning that I had only been in the waiting room, looking for news, for fourty-five minutes.

Close to two hours had passed when I saw Agent Hammond through the window on the door of the triage room. Behind him, a doctor that I could've sworn I'd never seen before. The doctor, still masked and wearing a gown from the operating room, approached me and took his mask off an ear at a time. Hammond stood a few feet back, hands folded behind his back. The doctor took a deep breath, looked anywhere but my eyes and I knew what he was going to say.

"Detective, I'm really -"

With a thud, I landed on the floor of our bedroom - the good thing was that my head barely missed the cherry oak night stand that sat next to our bed, the bad thing being that my shoulder took most of the fall and I was going to pay for it later. Tangled in the chocolate brown comforter, I lay defeated. My Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was becoming more and more like an unwelcome in-law: invasive, overwhelming, and never one to leave when the time was right. I could hear her reaching for the comforter that my fall had taken, so I scrambled to get back in bed. She didn't need to know that the nightmares were back, at least not at this hour.


End file.
